Category Archives: Hennepin County

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Today on streets.mn I write about Hennepin County’s half-assed new design for Minnhaha Ave, and their pathological use therein of one of the dopiest beasts in my menagerie of pet peeves: bus pull-outs. On probably one out of every four bus trips I take, I witness some schlub motoring recklessly around a bus and into some crosswalk, careless about the pedestrians that might be there that he or she has no way of seeing. That’s every other day I witness this personally, and spend most of my time on the bus staring at a piece of paper covered in ink markings.

There are other horrors of the roadways that I experience on a daily basis in Minneapolis. Related to the Crosswalk Plunge described above is the Half-cocked Hook, where a motorist completes most of a turn but slams on the brakes right before entering the crosswalk that’s occupied by a pedestrian that the motorist didn’t care to look for. This happens to me daily. Literally every day. Of course I already described in probably my greatest ever piece of writing that slimy piece of human garbage known as the Crosswalk Creep. I encounter this scum I would say once or twice per mile of walking.

All of this adds up to some truly terrifying (in the literal sense) and constantly frustrating walking conditions in Minneapolis. So why not just ride a bike? Well, because I encounter at least one bike lane blockage per ride. At least one driver buzzes me per ride. And on top of that, bikes also have to deal with Half-cocked Hookers who have no idea how to judge the speed of a cyclist so they delay their turn until just when the cyclist is entering the intersection. On a bike I probably get that every second or third ride.

This is not an inherent quality of city life. I’ve walked in countless cities that are more congested but don’t make me fear for my life with every step. This is an inherent quality of living in one of the most sprawling cities on earth, where there are entire municipalities of people who think it’s their god-given right for the government to provide them with an unclogged road to anywhere they want to go with a free, easy to find parking space at the end of it, and without having to pay a dime in taxes for it. That’s why a bike lane here and a bump-out there isn’t good enough. No, when the walking is deadly and the biking is deadly and the buses are only good for homeless shelters, but the streets are kinda bumpy, you don’t take new revenue and put it into filling potholes. At least you don’t if you’re a leader with integrity. You put it into the modes that have been marginalized and underfunded for decades. At least you do if you’re a leader with integrity.

That’s why it’s frustrating when there’s an opportunity to entirely rebuild a street, because that’s exactly when they should be optimizing streets for these historically marginalized modes. But instead we see stuff like the design for Minnehaha, which is much better for pedestrians, about the same for bikes, and much worse for buses. There has been some progress in the last 10 years, but we’re coming from way behind, so we can’t afford to let any opportunity pass us by.

Henn Cty’s draft Pedestrian Plan does not address beg buttons, not even inaccessible ones like this one that the County installed on Lake St

I recently took a fairly long vacation, which gave me time to review and comment in detail on Hennepin County’s draft Pedestrian Plan. It’s a small but welcome first step for the County, but has some significant shortcomings, most of all the failure to address land use and urban design impediments to walking in Hennepin County. My comments are below, in a format that the County’s online feedback form did not take kindly to. General comments are first, then specific. Comment period closes at 5pm Monday, so while I certainly don’t recommend wasting 4 hours on it like I did, you should at least put in a quick word against beg buttons (which are not addressed in the plan).

I’ve spent the majority of my life as a pedestrian in Hennepin County, so I welcome the creation of the first Hennepin County Pedestrian Plan. This is particularly welcome from an arm of the County that not too long ago was called the Highway Department, and only within the last decade or so showed any consideration of non-motorized transportation (we’re still waiting for it to pay attention to transit). Still, pedestrians in Hennepin County are used to having to push inaccessible beg buttons, cross superfluous motor vehicle lanes, and walk in ditches, shoulders or even travel lanes along County roadways. Hopefully this plan is an indication that the County intends to value pedestrian travel as highly as it currently values travel by personal car.

Unfortunately, the plan is probably too timid and high-level to make a practical difference in the short term. The goals are all rather basic (Why is it necessary to have a goal of improving pedestrian safety? Surely there is an existing requirement that County activities take safety into consideration?) and the strategies for implementation mostly call for further study (e.g. 2.2B. Identify and prioritize pedestrian improvements to enhance the pedestrian environment at Transit stops and along common routes to LRT and BRT stations – why doesn’t this plan serve as a foundation for identifying and prioritizing these improvements so that every new context for consideration of pedestrian facilities doesn’t have to start from scratch?) and only rarely call for concrete improvements (e.g. 1.2A. Install leading pedestrian intervals (LPI), Rectangular Rapid Flash Beacons (RRFB), and High-Intensity Activated Crosswalk Beacons (HAWK) where appropriate and feasible).

The plan has a second fatal defect in its singular focus on infrastructural solutions to degraded pedestrian environments in Hennepin County. In fact, land use has a huge impact on the decision of County residents whether or not to walk, which despite having a major bearing on Goals #2 and 3 is not considered in this plan at all (presumably an effect of the compartmentalization of County departments, as well as the intention of this plan to be folded into the Transportation System Plan that similarly fails to consider land use). In other words, this plan is solely focused on mobility, and entirely ignores accessibility, which is probably a bigger factor in encouraging pedestrian activity. Without a land use component, this is not a pedestrian plan, it is a sidewalks plan. While the County has a less direct impact on land use than on infrastructure, surely the pulpit of the state’s second largest unit of government by budget reaches enough ears that it could be an effective advocate for land use solutions. So the power of persuasion could be used, as could the County’s substantial granting programs (e.g. TOD, NSP, Brownfields, etc). While land use strategies could be incorporated into the plan’s draft goals, I suggest a fourth goal as well that Hennepin County affirmatively advocate pro-pedestrian policies when interacting with other jurisdictions.

Pedestrian activity in Hennepin County is too complex to be planned for in 54 pages. I suggest the finalization of the plan be delayed to accommodate a significant new chapter that attempts to define the universe of facilities related to pedestrians and prioritize them, as well as the incorporation of a fourth goal that commits the County to the advocacy of pedestrian activity to all interacting jurisdictions, and additionally considers land use (and ideally urban design, i.e. what happens to the pedestrian after he or she leaves public right-of-way) strategies to implementing the goals in addition to the infrastructural strategies identified in the draft. While this will certainly add some delay and likely cost more, it will result in a more effective plan. As noted on pages 5 & 6, there are significant costs to avoiding pedestrian activity, so every dollar the County invests in promoting it will be well spent.

2 Goals (p 7)

In addition the three existing goals, I propose Goal #4: Hennepin County should affirmatively encourage policies and activities that promote pedestrian behavior when interacting with other jurisdictions. Hennepin County is a patchwork of overlapping jurisdictions, and the County government has only so much direct responsibility with which to further the goals of the plan. Therefore the plan should explicitly state that its principles should be extended to every fingertip of the County, in order to reach those other jurisdictions and maximally impact the pedestrian environment. There are many opportunities to do so, starting with County granting programs, which could have pro-pedestrian criteria embedded in them; moving through County review of other jurisdictions’ plans, on which pedestrian impacts the County could comment; and extending even towards directly inviting municipalities to formulate their own pedestrian plans or adopt the goals of the County’s plan. The plan already agrees with this goal in such Strategies to Implement as 3.2A. Advocate in the Hennepin County legislative platform for statewide policy to mandate pedestrian safety education in school curriculum and the Practice to Continue outlined on page 32, Support the Development, Implementation, and Coordination of Municipal Pedestrian Plans. It would be further strengthened and made central to more of the County’s activities, however, if it were explicitly included as a goal.

4 Existing Conditions (pp 12-13)

This section contains valuable information about County residents who currently choose to walk to work or other destinations. It would be improved with information about the number of County residents who, based strictly on land use and intensity of use, potentially could walk to destinations but choose not to. This is feasible through GIS. For example, on page 68 of the Appendix, it states that the Met Council TBI found that the average walk journey was 10 minutes in duration. It is possible using GIS to calculate how many county residents live within a 10-minute walk of retail, office or industrial land uses to get a general idea of how many County residents could potentially walk to destinations but do not. This would be particularly useful to get a sense of the feasibility of the performance measures in Section 7.

6.1.1 Practices to Continue: Stripe Zebra-Style Crosswalks (p 23)

The plan states that “are currently the standard style of crosswalks installed on Hennepin County roads outside of Minneapolis.” The plan then continues to describe the rationale for this choice as that they’re “more visible to drivers”, presumably leading to a safety benefit for pedestrians. Why, then, are they not striped in Minneapolis? The plan should include as a Strategy to Implement that the County standard style of crosswalk should be extended to Minneapolis, as the site of 76% of the County’s pedestrian-vehicle crashes (p. 17). If the County standard is not practiced within Minneapolis city limits due to resistance from local officials, the plan should include as a Strategy to Implement a coordination of city-county roadway standards.

6.1.2 Signals (pp 24-25)

This section should include as a Strategy to Implement “Lagging Left Turns as Signal Timing Standard”, as was included for example in the City of Chicago’s Pedestrian Plan (chicagopedestrianplan.org). This practice has the benefit of increasing pedestrian safety and convenience, thus contributing towards all 3 goals outlined in the Hennepin County Plan. By allowing pedestrians to go first, goal 2 is obviously furthered. The contribution towards goal 1 is perhaps deductive, but it is observable that when the protected left turn is at the beginning of a phase, pedestrians tend to not notice and thereby enter the intersection at the same time as a driver has the right-of-way. This situation is absent when the protected left turn is at the end of the phase, and in addition in most cases the pedestrian traffic will have cleared by the time the left-turning vehicular traffic enters, effectively removing this conflict point. Lagging left turns should be the default signal programming, with engineers required to submit documentation of exceptional purpose for programming protected left turns at the beginning of a phase.

Additionally, this section should include as a Strategy to Implement “Require Documentation of Exceptional Purpose for Installation of Pedestrian-Actuated Signals.” These signals, less jargonistically known as beg buttons, reduce pedestrian safety both by requiring the pedestrian to touch a non-sanitized surface and by making the default signal timing unaccommodating to pedestrian travel. While the latter is mitigated by requiring the pedestrian to stop and wait until the next phase, this works against Goal #2 by significantly reducing the speed and convenience of pedestrian travel (depending on the season, comfort can also be significantly reduced). Further, it is unrealistic to expect pedestrians to always obey the signal, especially when they arrive at a signal while vehicular traffic moving in the same direction has a green light, so in a very real sense beg buttons criminalize pedestrian travel. It is difficult to evaluate any pedestrian plan’s outcome as pro-pedestrian if the plan does not call for default accommodation of pedestrians in signal phases.

Page 25 of the draft plan states that countdown timers are a “proven safety strategy.” Yet research on the safety benefits is mixed at best. Most studies seem to show that countdown timers do not discourage pedestrians from beginning to cross even after the Don’t Walk sign begins to flash, although usually it encourages pedestrians to cross more quickly (see for example Countdown Pedestrian Signals: A Comparison of Alternative Pedestrian Change Interval Displays by Jeremiah Singer & Neil Lerner). The latter effect is not a safety benefit, of course, given state law requires motorists to yield to pedestrians who remain in the intersection even after their phase is up, and considering that rushing pedestrians may encourage them to stumble or make some other dangerous error. Even if there is some safety benefit to countdown timers, it is much less than other benefits, such as the basic provision of sidewalks and crosswalks. Therefore countdown timers should be installed when logical as part of other processes, but not necessarily as part of its own initiative.

6.1.3

Strategy to Implement 1.3A. Formalize an Internal Procedure for Evaluating Pedestrian Safety Needs at Specific Locations in Response to Pedestrian-Vehicle Crashes and Community Concerns.
(p 27)

This strategy is laudable, but should be modified to include as a priority the inclusion of a method of public transparency of the evaluation process. That is, not only should residents be able to “report pedestrian connectivity and safety concerns”, they should also be able at least to monitor the evaluation process and outcome in as close to real time as is reasonable, and further there should be a mechanism for public input into the evaluation outcome.

This is an excellent strategy for more efficiently and safely accommodating multimodal transportation. Based on the brief description included in the plan, it seems that opportunities for 4-to-3 land conversions are sought on a piecemeal basis, as restriping of individual roadway segments is undertaken. The county should consider coming up with a master plan of 4-to-3 conversion opportunities. This would not only allow perhaps for a more logical and consistent rollout of this practice, but also for early notice of candidates, which otherwise occasionally can take neighbors by surprise and introduce controversy to the process.

6.5 Partnerships (pp 40-41)

It is unclear if the strategies outlined in this section are of equivalent priority to the strategies in sections 6.1-6.5. The plan states that these “goals” (are they goals or strategies? Where is the difference elucidated in the plan?) are “are outside of the county’s role and will be led by others” but some are clearly within the County’s purview, for example 6.5.3 mentions county participation in providing pedestrian wayfinding, which is explicitly mentioned as a part of StI 2.2A (and possibly is allowed in the REPP program mentioned on p 33). In addition, while the County Sheriff’s Office is a quasi-separate organization, it obviously has many natural synergies with the rest of the County’s operations, and frankly if it wasn’t a participant in this planning process, it certainly should have been. Further, if the County isn’t willing to play a lead role in the accomplishment of these goals, why should other jurisdictions? Why couldn’t the County develop a wayfinding plan, for example? Why couldn’t the County develop a crosswalk law enforcement strategy, or an awareness strategy (as MnDot recently did, for example)?

7 Performance Measures (pp 42-44)

It’s not clear how the performance measures correspond to the Strategies to Implement or Strategies to Continue. Without explicit relation, the plan risks having a performance measure that has no strategy to measure, or a strategy the effect of which remains unmeasured.

7.2 PERCENT OF HENNEPIN COUNTY RESIDENTS WHO WALK TO A DESTINATION AT LEAST ONCE PER WEEK (p 44)

As I commented above regarding Section 4, it is difficult to gauge the feasibility and/or aggressiveness of many of these performance measures in the absence of more detailed date on existing conditions. However, this goal strikes me as particularly weak. If the County achieves its goals, walking should be seen as an attractive option for a wide variety of trips for the vast majority of the County’s population. In that case, if almost half of county residents still chose to effectively never walk, even to the neighborhood retail or park, than what would the point of this plan be?

According to Hennepin County, around 7,500 bus riders will travel on Washington Ave at peak hour (4:30-5:30 PM) between Hennepin and 35W on an average weekday in the year 2035. For some perspective, that’s about the same amount of cyclists estimated to ride the Washington Ave Bridge on a typical day, which is the busiest location for cyclists in Minneapolis. To be honest, I’m not really sure where Hennepin County got that number, but they mention something about Metro Transit estimating 30 passengers on an average peak hour bus, and if that’s true, that means around 5,000 riders are commuting by bus on this segment of Washington at peak hour today, which would seem to rival the number of cars.

These numbers are fuzzy, obviously, but it seems clear that a large number of people are riding transit on Washington Ave. So why isn’t Hennepin County proposing a layout that would benefit that mode? In fact the four proposed layouts actually make things worse for transit by moving most bus stops to right-turn lanes, where they face the delay of having to pull in and out of general traffic, and where riders face the safety threat of vehicles turning right around the bus. Besides the sheer number of existing transit trips, there are other reasons that a responsible analysis of options for Washington Ave would include dedicated bus lanes, which I’ll detail below.

Preparing for battle

The Gateway Ramp is a major bus layover facility. Part of the fuzziness of the bus rider numbers above, I think, is that they assume average occupancy for the buses running on Washington, about half of which actually pick up and drop off most of their passengers on Marquette or 2nd, so run mostly empty on Washington as they access the Gateway Ramp to lay over. Even if they’re not carrying passengers on Washington, though, it is important to the passengers they pick up later that they not encounter congestion, so their eventual passengers will benefit from dedicated facilities that allow them to be picked up reliably. In addition, the Gateway Ramp has been apparently been designated as a layover facility for an unspecifiedly enormous number more buses so that the City can do what it wants with the Nicollet Hotel block. That likely means that 30-60 additional buses will be soon be traveling on Washington between the Gateway Ramp and Hennepin Ave, relying on a congestion-free route to deliver timely service. (The Gateway Ramp is also a convenient place for the up to 6,000 employees in Ryan’s recently proposed development to catch an express bus.)

Clustering transit and providing dedicated lanes on Washington will maximize the impact of transit investment, create a more legible system, and improve route spacing. Hennepin County’s analysis provides a depiction of the bird’s nest of transit routes on Washington:

This diagram should set off alarms at Metro Transit. If transportation engineers need to create a diagram like this to understand the network structure, what chance does a lifelong suburbanite retiree who just bought a condo on Washington have? Bus lanes would offer reassurance to confused riders that yes, they can catch a bus on this street. If Metro Transit were to use the bus lanes for its various archaically routed local services that use Washington for a portion of their trip already, it would be able to focus shelter improvement money on this one street instead of spreading it between several (not that there is any apparent shelter improvement on the downtown segments of these routes currently). This would also have the effect of maximizing frequency (a rider traveling between 7 Corners and Hennepin could catch any of 3 routes), adding legibility (riders would not have to memorize where the 7 & 22 turn off of Washington), and spacing (the thousands of new housing units being added to the Mill District face a long walk to convenient transit service).

These advantages are recognized and supported by the City of Minneapolis, which recommends reorganizing downtown transit to cluster along three corridors they call spines (a biological metaphor that becomes less apt the more spines you have). The buses running closest to the riverine edge of downtown are left as they lay, probably out of inertia. Yet these services would benefit from “spining” too, and perhaps more, since lower-frequency services will gain more from higher effective frequencies due to clustering. I have made a table of the number of buses at the peak hour on Washington Ave by segment and direction, based on data from Hennepin County, but adding a spine scenario, which assumes the 3 and the 7 proceed along the length of the corridor and the 22 travels on Washington east of Hennepin (it also adds the 14 west of Hennepin as it travels today but was not included in the Hennepin County data for some reason; I’d add that it may make sense to add the 14 to this spine west of Chicago or 11th Ave S).

In the segment where reconstruction is imminent (outlined on the table), average headways are expected to be three minutes or less at peak hour in 2035, and are currently under one minute for all but one block in the westbound direction. The spine scenario brings average headways in each direction to under 3 minutes, and by 2035 both directions of Washington will carry a bus less than every 2 minutes. These are really substantial bus volumes, unlikely to be exceeded by any Nicollet Mall, Hennepin, or the main E-W bus spine. So why are those streets candidates for bus facilities (even if they’re half-assed ones), but not Washington?

Of course, most of this service could cluster on 3rd or 4th Sts instead of Washington, but those seem to have fewer advantages and more disadvantages. Briefly, Washington connects better to the remainder of the routes on the east and west ends, which means less delay caused by turning. 4th St is an awkward distance from the LRT stations on 5th St, too far for first-time users to see the transfer stop from the station, and also too far to really work as combined effective frequency, yet not spread enough for the larger portion of downtown to benefit. Washington is convenient to the two fastest-growing neighborhoods in the state, and with this effective frequency could provide easy access for the residents of these new dense buildings to regional transit (LRT or Highway BRT). Finally, in order to fit (ideally two) bus lanes on 3rd or 4th, you need a curb-t0-curb width that leaves too little space for sidewalks. Currently the sidewalks are reduced to 10-12′ on these streets, whereas the wider right-of-way on Washington would allow for ample sidewalks in addition to the bus facilities.

But assuming we continue our practice of ignoring the huge current use and future potential of bus transit, why should we prioritize transit rather than bikes or cars? Well, Washington is actually not as connective for cars & bikes. OK, there are a pair of big freeways on the each side of Downtown that make it a convenient route for cars, but even those are duplicated by other exits a few blocks away (or will be soon). In terms of surface connections, it’s also not very useful for cars. As I’ve argued before, and as residents tend to agree, Cedar is inappropriate as an auto commuting route. North Washington has some destinations, but is superseded by 2nd St by the time it gets to Plymouth Ave (certainly North Loop destinations don’t generate enough car trips to justify 3 lanes).

For bikes, too, Washington is not ideal as a through route. Of course the U of M is a big destination, but to reach it from Washington you need to turn at least twice and/or carry your bike up the stairs behind Willey Hall. A better U of M connection to Downtown is CPED’s (possibly abandoned) proposal for a path in the trench that would connect to the LRT trail at Curry Park, which would maximize connectivity and have the greatest separation. Even if you could somehow create a surface route between Washington and the U of M, it would likely be slower than a trench route and the LRT trail because of the left turn and all the stoplights. Anyway, the LRT trail is likely to be at least as important a source of bike trips into downtown as the U of M (or at least that’s the goal), and Washington both connects poorly to it and is out of the way for people trying to access the core (requiring two left turns).

3rd St would work best for a regional bike facility that goes through downtown (unlike West River Parkway, which bypasses it), especially because 3rd St offers connections to the Northside that Washington doesn’t. As noted above, Washington itself kind of peters out as a frontage road to I-94 north of Plymouth Ave, but even the parts that are there will be difficult to retrofit for bike facilities – certainly it wouldn’t be able to do any better than duplicate the lanes that exist on 2nd St N. 3rd St, on the other hand, connects directly to the LRT trail on the east, and with some additional cantilevering of the sidewalk along the 4th St Viaduct could connect directly to the Cedar Lake Trail and be extended across the Cut and through the Interchange to the bike lanes on 7th St N, basically the main bike route between Downtown and the Northside (it could also connect to the off-street trail that could logically be placed along Olson Hwy, but doesn’t seem to be in anyone’s plan for some reason).

Of course people will still want to use bikes and cars to access destinations on Washington Ave. Bus lanes actually work really well for this since they are used heavily primarily at the peak hours, and at other times they can be flexed for other uses, including parking. A bus lane works much better for bikes than a general traffic lane because there are typically far more gaps between buses than cars. At rush hour on Washington you wouldn’t want to bike the length of the street, but the minute gap between buses will allow you to bike on one of the ample adjacent facilities on 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th, then up one of the north-south bike routes (for example 1st, Hennepin, Nicollet, 4th, 5th, Portland, Park, or 11th), and then the one or two blocks remaining to your destination. I would suggest 16′ shared bus-bike lanes, separated by a solid white line except for the 150′ or so before right turn intersections, and symbolized by a diamond. 5-6” advisory bike lanes could be striped to guide cyclists toward the left side of the lane to minimize the amount of leap frog, and a 1-2′ mountable curb could be placed between the Shared Bus-Bike Lanes (SBBLs) and general traffic lanes to provide a buffer for cyclists and to discourage the spread of congestion by stupid or greedy motorists.

Would all this fit? For the most part, yes:

Existing

SBBL configuration

You can add SBBLs and fit within the right-of-way and have sidewalk space at least as wide or wider than most of Hennepin County’s proposed layouts and what is there now. SBBLs are an ideal compromise solution that provide for the existing and future demand of cars and transit, but also provide a more comfortable space for bikes and opportunities for parking. It is a shame that Hennepin County only does planning for transportation by car instead of transportation for all, or there may have been a possibility for a holistic solution that would be appealing to a larger group rather than their special-interest focused layouts.

If a street that carries 15,000 transit passengers in a typical day – as many as some light rail lines in the US – doesn’t deserve dedicated bus lanes, what street does? Is it realistic to expect that the maybe 50 miles of light rail being developed in the Twin Cities will be able to shift the millions of daily trips here to a lower-emission mode? Buses are crucial to our current transit system and will continue to be crucial to our future transit system, which represents our best hope for achieving environmental and equity goals through transportation policy. If one of the cycle track options is built, I will certainly enjoy riding it to Grumpy’s every once in a while. But if the Washington Ave process means that the Twin Cities is just shifting from focusing all transportation planning on making it nice to drive to focusing all transportation planning on making it nice to bike, I’m taking the first bus out of here to someplace that plans transportation comprehensively, without mode bias, and with an eye towards societal goals.

My Rybak post the other day, though intended to be less about the stadium itself and more about what what we would be better off building instead of a stadium, prompted me to think a bit more than I wanted to about the Metrodome site for a new Vikings stadium. Specifically a revelation about the plan to capture parking meter revenue prompted me to write a whole new post for this, but there are a couple other pieces I’d like to cover as well, and hopefully this post will prompt a catharsis that will put the whole topic out of my head. Bear with me, please.

Meter madness

Minnescraper user newsole pointed out that it appears that only parking meter revenue from days with Vikings games would be dedicated to the stadium. The plan doesn’t explicitly say that, but it does say that in the first year $842,500 would be raised from “1,000 Meters at $25 Plus 1,975 Meters at $30 each”, which newsole mathed out to “1000 meters x $25 + 1975 parking spots x 30 = $84,250 per game. 10 home games = $842,500 the first year.” Convincing, but it does raise even more issues in my head.

Treasure Map

First, the cost of operating parking meters is not nothing. Since this plan uses almost half the meters in the system, it presumably would represent almost half the daily cost of running the system. (We’ll ignore the fact that these should be some of the more expensive meters to operate; since they are some of the highest-demand meters they are the ones that will offer the highest ROI for enforcement, so the city should also be spending more time enforcing them. I don’t know if it actually does, though.) However, the plan dedicates all of the revenue from these meters to the stadium, leaving other meters to cover their cost. This is probably a relatively small cost, but it does remove revenue from other meters that would otherwise go to the general fund, so effectively more meters than the plan states will be going to stadium costs. Presumably this is omitted from the plan out of laziness more than deceptiveness. It’s not clear that the meter revenue is an attempt to present a veneer of user tax, and if it is, a bit more thought will show that to be untrue, as my next point may indicate.

Second, if 2,975 meters are dedicated to the stadium, some of them are going to be far enough from the stadium to be unintuitive for use as game parking. Assuming 14 spaces per block face without curb cuts, the 227 block faces east of Marquette and north of 11th would account for 3,178 spaces, so presumably that’s the approximate area being considered for revenue capture. But it’s hard to imagine someone cruising past all those ample lots in East Downtown still looking for a meter. Because of the huge numbers of meters involved, this is going to be true regardless of where the line is drawn. Many of these areas are nonetheless high-intensity destinations, and thus likely to suck in parkers despite the distance from the stadium. But is it realistic to expect full occupancy all day? Which brings me to….

Third, football games seem interminable to me, but my understanding is that in reality they only last 3 hours. In some cases, people will arrive early and stay downtown all night before driving home. These party animals may pay for a full day’s worth of parking, although my guess is that it would be rare for them to arrive at 8am, and those football fans that stay past dinner will be the exception. I don’t know what the specific pricing plan is, but the current max rate of $2 per hour would net $30 per day if it were in use for the longest meter time, 8am to 11pm, currently only applied in the Warehouse District. To get $30 per day for a more realistic estimate of a typical Vikings fan’s visit, say 6 hours, the rate would have to be $5 per hour, more than double the current highest rate and five times more than current rates around the dome. Maybe people would pay – I don’t think that’s any higher than event parking in lots, and it would offer the advantage of not having to wait in line to exit the lot. But it still seems unrealistic to expect the full daily amount at almost 3,000 spaces on every game day. To get that, we’d probably need a Vikings team that’s a lot better than we’ve seen in a while.

Going with the wind

Will East Downtown get this...

Someone needs to tell Ted Mondale or R.T. Rybak the old proverb about the devil you know, since the vagueness of the East Downtown proposal seems giving birth to monsters in the minds of key stakeholders.* This problem is compounded by the fact that the Metrodome sit has gone through several cuts of revisions, to the point where it makes up at least 6 mostly contradictory entries on Bill’s Top 19 Renderings list, the most recent of which I think is #19 on this list, summarized by the author as “I have no idea what is going on with this. Are those trees?”

This key stakeholder confusion bubbled over into an even more obfuscatory Star Tribune article about how some local counties’ morgues might merge and how mad Rich Stanek is about it, or something. Anyway, the story reports the Emperor Mondale offered the county morgue as tribute to the Vikings in the form of a plaza. If the team magnanimously accepts this offering and Hennepin County’s petty objections can be pushed aside, it would create a plaza of around 6.5 acres. Apparently added to that would be the balance of the Metrodome’s footprint after the new stadium was built to the east but overlapping it to some unknown degree.

...or this?

For comparison’s sake, Elliot Park is 6.44 acres. Plazas of that size are usually described as barren and windswept. The U’s West Bank has been described as such despite having much smaller contiguous open spaces. Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, however, is about the same size and has been often praised, but has the benefit of being more park-like, with rows of trees and shrubs breaking up the space. We don’t have many clues as to what kind of plaza we’ll get, but the existing nothingness of East Downtown’s** streetscape prejudices me into the assumption that it will be more Tienanmen than Millennium.

11th hour for 11th Ave

Reuben discussed the fate of 11th Ave S on streets.mn recently. The pliability of this street is apparently responsible for the feasibility of the Metrodome plan, as by sacrificing itself it allows the Vikings to avoid playing at the U of M while the new stadium is under construction. But, as with the possible proposed plaza, details are scarce on just how 11th will be plied.

11th Ave Complete Street Tunnel

Reuben’s discussion pretty much nailed my concerns about the physical result of tussling with 11th – closing it would further isolate the already freeway-carved neighborhoods, there is a danger of severing or rendering less useful the crucial bike route, and decking the new stadium over 11th would probably accomplish those things and create quasi-freeway conditions that would endanger the usability of the street beyond the covered segment. My concern is more about the process – while 11th Ave doesn’t have metrowide significance, it’s pretty damn important to the neighborhoods it runs through. If the worst boogiemen are realized about the stadium plan, and 11th ends up tunnelized or severed, this will have been a significant change to local infrastructure that was initiated with almost no public input. I believe that EISes are usually waived for sports palaces like these, and I’ve heard no sign that the public will even be able to see the plan before it’s finalized, much less comment on it. Probably the most galling thing about it is that this type of top-down democracy is coming from touchy-feely democrats like Mark Dayton and R.T. Rybak. (The latter has been quoted as refusing to hold a referendum on the plan, saying “The referendum is when I stand for re-election.” The Mayor has that right, at least.) Mark Dayton, of whom I’m a huge fan, keeps rattling on about a “People’s Stadium” but has forgotten to invite the actual people. It’s amazing the hypocrisy that is exposed when a popular millionaire asks for a handout.

Are you done yet?

Whew. I hope that’s all I have to say about this stadium for a while. Hopefully you found something more interesting to read before you got to this part. If not, I promise not to do this to you again until at least 2016, when we all will start getting Stadium Investment Capture taxes deducted from our paychecks.

*I faintly remember a blissful time in my life before I was aware of the word stakeholder.

Here is the last of my three-part Bottineau rant, which at this point may be considered a full-fledged tirade. Somewhat coincidentally, it arrives on the same day the Minneapolis City Council makes its recommendation for a Locally Preferred Alternative, which is more or less required by the FTA for the project to advance. It looks like the Council has acquiesced to the LRT D1 alternative – Wirth-Olson – but with the clever stipulation that Hennepin County and Metro Transit agree to develop at least one arterial transitway through North Minneapolis along Penn, Emerson/Fremont, or West Broadway. I’m not aware of any attempt by the city to gather their citizens’ opinions, outside of the county-led process, but of course you can always provide input to the Bottineau project office.

My last post proposed the consideration of an LRT subway through North Minneapolis, which would do a zillion times better job of serving the heart of the Northside without the impact of a surface route, and based on our history with Hiawatha is unlikely to be as expensive as other recent American below-grade transit projects. An LRT subway will not be considered in Minnesota – it’s just too “coastal.” In that case, I think the best alternative for Bottineau would be BRT on West Broadway. This was actually considered in the AA study, and scored well enough that it just barely missed the arbitrary cutoff to make it to the scoping phase. Actually it would have probably made the cutoff (unless the cutoff was again raised to exclude it) if the AA study hadn’t penalized all BRT alternatives. See for yourself- here is the Traveler Time Savings (in regional minutes per day) measure from page 76 of AA study:

Not enough minutes in the day

The study claims that “LRT alternatives outscore BRT alternatives on this measure because they have shorter end-to-end travel times” which is interesting because a) the BRT and LRT alternatives would follow identical alignments, and b) technically buses and trains are capable of the same operating speeds. Because the chart above is pretty much the most detailed information in the AA study about travel times, I’m not sure how they determined that BRT alternatives would take longer than LRT in the exact same alignment. The study also projected fewer riders for BRT alternatives, but not nearly enough fewer to explain the missing minutes. Here is a comparison table I made using data from the AA study:

This chart teases us with a clue: It may have had something to do with the Interchange, Hennepin County’s platitudinously named train station, which is the only point where some LRT and BRT alternatives diverged. Specifically, D3 and D4, the former of which does significantly worse on traveler time savings, are assumed to run “on a busway parallel to the I-94 viaduct” then to turn south a block to stop at the Interchange, then proceed eventually a block back north to 4th St. This is a terrible idea. If they were actually thinking about how to maximize the benefits of the transportation system, D3 and D4 would have an advantage over the other alternatives because they could use the viaduct itself.

The 4th St Viaduct (should be plural, since there are actually two viaducts) is massively overbuilt. It is two lanes in each direction, but caters primarily to peak traffic, leaving at least half the roadway underutilized at all times. If one viaduct were made reversible, the other could be used for a two-way busway, providing a transit advantage into Downtown Minneapolis. In addition, if the south viaduct were used, it could provide an even better, if more expensive, connection to the Northstar station than LRT would:

Which would you prefer?

The viaduct could connect directly to West Broadway with a little modification of the existing interchanges. Basically a ramp could just be added from West Broadway to the existing ramp from I-94 to the viaduct, and then another ramp from that ramp over to the other viaduct. It’s a bit trickier to connect the westbound viaduct to westbound West Broadway. The Alexandrian way, depicted below, would just build a flyover from the viaduct to the 94 ramp to Washington, at which BRT could have signal priority. Ideally the BRT viaduct would connect to I-94 so express buses could use it too, which could be done by adding a ramp going straight where the westbound ramp bends to meet Washington. In addition to a station at the Interchange, there could be one serving the densifying North Loop at 8th or 10th Ave N.

Green is BRT, Yellow is I-94 access, Red is the relocated ramp from I-94 to Lyndale Ave

Another reason the West Broadway BRT (D4 on the chart) scored well in general is that it wasn’t really BRT, at least not east of Penn, where the alternative studied would operate in mixed traffic. This was done to “eliminat[e] the need to disrupt traffic or remove businesses.” Of course, disrupting traffic is to some degree the goal of developing transitways; you want to shift traffic from cars to transit vehicles. But is disrupting traffic or removing businesses necessary to accommodate BRT on West Broadway?

As I mentioned above, West Broadway is 80′ east of Penn, and they cram in four through lanes and parking in many places. Traffic counts hover around 20,000/day, but drops off steeply west of Emerson/Fremont, so that the counts west of Morgan are around 10k/day. Assuming west of Girard only two traffic lanes are needed, guideway will fit there without widening even on the 75′ sections – assuming a 28′ guideway and two 11′ through lanes, 25′ are left over for sidewalks or maybe parking in some places. East of Girard, 28′ will be needed for guideway and at least 40′ for four through lanes (suck it up, Hennepin County and MnDot, 10′ lanes works for much busier streets, even with trucks). That means the road will need to be widened slightly (mostly 90′, but possibly 100′ at stations.)

Widening this area of West Broadway would not be like widening Penn. Frankly, there aren’t many buildings left to destroy here. If the widening was taken from the north side of the street east of Fremont (there should be just enough room on the block west of Fremont for 90′ with tearing down buildings – the bright side of setbacks), then switch to the south side east of Bryant, there should be room for 90-100′ without tearing down anything except the small cluster west of Emerson.

Joe Gladke, Hennepin County’s Manager of Engineering and Transit Planning, mentioned in a presentation to the Minneapolis TPW Committee that LRT and full BRT was dropped from West Broadway because of business owners’ concern over loss of parking. That’s like being concerned over loss of sand in the Sahara. I did a quick measurement of parking lots in the West Broadway business district and found that 16 of the 64 acres between Girard and 94, 18th and 21st are parking lots – that’s 25% of the gross area! (And that’s not counting the 550 space lot that will be built with MPS’ new headquarters.)

Lots of lots (sorry I couldn’t resist)

So it’s possible to build reserved-guideway BRT on West Broadway that won’t disrupt traffic and will remove only a handful of businesses. This alignment would go through the heart of North Minneapolis, serving thousands more residents, and present ample opportunities for TOD (see vast parking lot fields above). Based on the cost estimates from the AA – where BRT generally came in at around half the cost of LRT – it would still cost substantially less than the proposed LRT alternatives. That would allow perks like the conversion of the 4th St Viaduct to a combined reversible roadway and two-way busway, which would serve an additional high-density neighborhood and provide a benefit to the express bus network.

The lower cost of BRT would also allow both Brooklyn Park and Maple Grove to serve as termini for the same price, although the AA study didn’t find benefits commensurate to the costs of serving both branches. I stubbornly maintainthat if we’re going to spend regional money on a development-inducing transitway, it would benefit the region more to serve existing struggling activity centers like Brooklyn Center rather than provide a further incentive to fringe development. But the other advantage of BRT, apparently unexplored in the Bottineau process, is that multiple routes with vastly different termini can branch out after using the busway, known as Open BRT. So Maple Grove and Brooklyn Park could both be served, even if the guideway continues to Brooklyn Center, as could Plymouth, New Hope, Crystal or even Rogers.

I hope I’m not focusing on BRT because of the recent flak Hiawatha has taken from anti-transit ideologues, who nonetheless have a valid point about how expensive the line is both to build and to operate. Central and likely Southwest serve enough high-density areas that they’re likely to better justify their costs, and since Hiawatha serves major regional destinations like the airport and the MOA it will likely benefit significantly from the network effect of three light rail lines.

Bottineau, on the other hand, doesn’t serve a major regional destination outside of Downtown Minneapolis, so it is unlikely to benefit from a network effect outside of the meager one accounted for in the AA study. The Wirth-Olson alignment serves only one relatively high-density and high-poverty neighborhood – around Van White – and has few potential candidates for redevelopment inside the beltway. It runs through almost three miles of parkland for chrissakes! It just doesn’t make sense to spend a billion dollars on a transitway with that little potential. It’s unlikely my proposal for full BRT on West Broadway will be considered in the DEIS, much less an LRT subway in North Minneapolis, but I hope that BRT stays in the running. I want to believe in LRT for Bottineau, but it looks like BRT is a better option.

In my last post, I went through some of the reasons why existing land use is unlikely to support even the medium-capacity transit system provided by LRT or BRT Bottineau alignments. In the absence of inflated commuter ridership figures, the only compelling reason to build the line is economic development. But if Bottineau is being built primarily for economic development, why is it avoiding the most economically disadvantaged part of the state? If Bottineau is supposed to encourage the development of housing and jobs along the line, why not route it to areas in need of redevelopment rather than to the fringe? Why should we spend a billion dollars to just encourage more development on the edge of town?

If a goal of the line is economic development, there is a better northern terminus: Brooklyn Center. According to DEED data compiled by the Met Council, Brooklyn Center lost more than 5,000 jobs between 2000 and 2010, which is no more than a crumb of the Metro area’s total jobs (around 1.5m), but represents almost a third of the jobs once held in this community within easy commuting distance of some of the state’s poorest neighborhoods. Developing a major job center on the old Brookdale site would have been ideal from a regional planning standpoint: more so than the sprawling Arbor Lakes area (this is where a pedestrian was recently hit and killed by a car while on the sidewalk), and especially the fringe site of Target Suburban Headquarters, Brooklyn Center is adequately served by existing transportation infrastructure, including an easy (if theoretical) bus ride from the Fridley Northstar station.

Target Suburban HQ on Brookdale's footprint

Right-of-way is readily available in the median of Hwy 100 – at about 25′, it’s not quite wide enough for LRT guideway, so it would likely require some reconstruction of the roadway, probably shrinking the outside shoulders a bit – and alongside Shingle Creek Pkwy further north. The most expensive elements would be flyovers from the BNSF track north of Robbinsdale onto Hwy 100 and from the freeway onto Shingle Creek, and widening or replacing the bridge over Twin Lakes. I depicted a station at France, but since that would require a good 45′ of median, the full roadway would need to be reconstructed and the overpass replaced, so the low-density area probably wouldn’t immediately be worth the expense. Anyway by the time this is built, Surly will probably have moved to their “destination” brewery, so no big loss.

This route may seem indirect, but I think it makes more sense in terms of regional connectivity and suburb-to-suburb travel. Assuming a network of freeway BRT-ish routes, a more complete grid would be formed by extending a Hwy 100 route along Bottineau Blvd north of Robbinsdale rather than jutting east to Brookdale.

Would a Brookdale route be time-competitive with cars? Google says that the fastest route from Brooklyn Center Transit Center to 4th & Hennepin is 13 minutes without congestion. Based on the average speeds of Hiawatha, a light rail version of my proposed route running in a tunnel from the BNSF line to Plymouth and I-94 would take 17 minutes from Bass Lake Road (near Brooklyn Center Transit Center) to the Warehouse District station, about 30% longer than google (and much less time than the existing express buses, which go through Camden and take about a half hour). That compares well to Central LRT, which takes about 29% longer than the 94 route (if you believe the dubious claims) and a whopping 89% of google’s drive time.

Approx. route for Bottineau on bedrock map of North Mpls - red is segment in tunnel

Of course, tunneling is expensive, and as I mentioned above, it’s hard to believe the Penn or Wirth-Olson alternatives will deliver the ridership to justify even surface-running light rail. But we’re not talking about New York or Seattle here – North Minneapolis lies on an excellent surface for deep-bore tunneling, easy-digging sandstone capped with a solid, stable roof of limestone. Best of all for a Northside route, the portals would both lie in a sandstone layer. Based on Hiawatha’s tunneling costs, the 5 km required for a Northside LRT subway would cost $300m, about a third of the projected costs for the other LRT alternatives. Best of all, it would reach the heart of North Minneapolis without destroying existing communities or severing the street grid. I think it’s worth considering, but the project managers do not. Here is an email I sent them two years ago and their response:

12/04/2009 01:10 PM

To: bottineau@co.hennepin.mn.us

cc: gail.dorfman@co.hennepin.mn.us

Subject: complete Alternatives Analysis for Bottineau

Hi,

In order to completely evaluate the alternatives for the Bottineau corridor, another alternative should be considered that would be light-rail or bus in a tunnel through North Minneapolis.

Minneapolis and Hennepin County are finally ready for world-class transit and, considering the major overhaul in Federal transportation funding due next year, the Federal government may finally be ready to give Americans the quality in public transit that they deserve (and that has been exclusively bestowed on the motoring public up to now).

North Minneapolis has some of the highest rates of transit ridership in the Twin Cities, and, after a history of public disinvestment in the area, they deserve a high-quality transit line. I am confident that, if projections take into consideration a built-out transit system, the ridership would justify the higher cost. It would also benefit the suburban commuters as a grade-separated direct route would likely offer the quickest travel time into and out of downtown Minneapolis.

I have more ideas about an North Minneapolis subway alternative for the Bottineau Corridor, and, if you’re interested, I’d be happy to expound on them. If not, I thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Alex

From: “bottineau@co.hennepin.mn.us” <bottineau@co.hennepin.mn.us>

To: Alex Bauman

Sent: Friday, December 11, 2009 4:25 PM

Subject: Re: complete Alternatives Analysis for Bottineau

Mr. Bauman,

Thank you for your email regarding the Bottineau Transitway Alternatives Analysis Study and your thoughts regarding a tunnel alignment concept through North Minneapolis.

We share your interests in providing high quality transit services for Twin Cities residents including those who live in North Minneapolis.

As you likely know, our study process is being conducted in collaboration with FTA guidelines as they exist today. Hennepin County is also actively engaged in policy development and FTA proposed rule making regarding transitway investment programs in collaboration with our Minnesota legislative delegation in Washington DC.

Like you, we are also looking forward to potential changes in the Federal Transportation Re-authorization Bill and how this bill may lead to enhance the quality of transit provided in the United States, the Twin Cities Region, and Hennepin County. Should the transportation bill direct transformational changes in the way transit investments are made, Hennepin County and other units of government will be obligated to study the implications of these changes on the Bottineau Corridor.

However, we also think you deserve a sober historical perspective and look to the future regarding the potential to pursue a transitway tunnel design through North Minneapolis. As you’ve indicated, tunnels are costly (often in the range of 10 times the amount of a surface facility) and need substantial user benefits in order to justify their costs. It is instructive to consider that transitway tunnel construction in this country has been implemented through densely populated areas and/or high activity centers. Examples that come to mind include New York City, the Seattle Central Business District, and the San Francisco Central Business District. Relatively short segment tunnels have also been implemented for high activity centers such as San Diego State University Campus, the University of Washington Campus (entering construction at a expected cost of $1.95 Billion), and the Hiawatha LRT tunnel beneath our Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport. It should also be noted that tunnels tend to be implemented with high capacity transit modes such as subway metro lines. These systems provide higher capacity/utility than intermediate capacity BRT or LRT mode systems and can more easily justify tunneling costs.

The most recent local example of transit tunneling investigation/feasibility is for the Central Corridor LRT segment along Washington Avenue through the U of M campus. The cost estimate for a 2,050 foot tunnel was $128 Million above the cost of a surface running facility. This translates to a per mile cost of $329 Million. This estimate assumes no stations in the tunnel segment (stations add substantially to the cost of underground construction). It was determined that this tunnel segment was not feasible and the current Central Corridor LRT project includes a surface transit operations along Washington Avenue.

The approximate distance between 36th Avenue in Robbinsdale and the Minneapolis Transportation Interchange facility near Target Field is approximately 4.7 miles [He appears to be measuring here using the Wirth-Olson alignment, as though I’d suggest putting that already largely grade-separated alignment in a tunnel. As the crow flies, the distance between 36th & the Interchange is 3.7 miles, and as I mentioned above, I think a tunnel could be limited to about 5 km. – Alex]. Using the $329 Million per mile cost from above to illustrate a rough order of magnitude, the cost of a transit tunnel through North Minneapolis could be in excess of $1.5 Billion without accounting for station facilities. This would more than double the current Bottineau Transitway alternative cost estimates.

North Minneapolis is a mix of single family with some higher density multi-family dwellings. This area does have relatively strong transit ridership now and potential into the future. Considering the growing needs around the country for transit investments one can appreciate how transformational the transportation re-authorization bill and funding program would need to be in order to justify long tunnel segments through lower density neighborhoods like North Minneapolis for intermediate capacity transit service like LRT.

In summary, your input is appreciated and we look forward to assessing how the federal transportation re-authorization bill will affect transitway concepts for the Bottineau Corridor.

Please let me know if you have additional questions or would like more information.

Regards,

Brent Rusco

An LRT subway station in a suburb of Stuttgart mostly characterized by single-family homes

He does a good, and probably justified, job of making me sound crazy. He also builds his argument around tunneling projects that are entirely unlike those that would be reasonably considered for Bottineau. I already mentioned that Minneapolis has a much more stable geology for tunneling than Seattle’s Ring of Fire location or New York’s famously hard and unstable schist. Sandstone is called sand stone for a reason. The Washington Ave example is more subtly inapplicable – a cut-and-cover tunnel was proposed for an extremely dense environment; even the cut-and-cover tunnel on Nicollet in Whittier studied for Southwest LRT was expected to cost less, and a deep-bored tunnel would certainly be less expensive per mile. Finally, it’s ludicrous to suggest that LRT systems are rarely in tunnels; there are dozens of counter-examples, including Bergen’s system, which has around half the per kmcost of Hiawatha despite running in tunnels for a quarter of its route.

It may seem inconsistent to say that land use doesn’t support the Wirth-Olson LRT proposal, but at the same time to champion an LRT subway. The difference is a matter of objectives – the existing Bottineau process has the objective of “improving regional mobility” in the context of a transportation-engineering institution that has been slowly evolving over the past few decades until it at last includes factors such as effect on low-income communities. But Bottineau as proposed runs through low-density areas, serves few job centers and generally avoids low-income communities, so it doesn’t really meet that objective.

A Bottineau process that considered a light-rail tunnel would probably be too expensive to meet traditional quasi-economic standards (though those traditional standards are giving a green light to a $700m roadway to carry 25,000 cars across the St Croix River), so it would need to come out of a more holistic institution, one that considered urban development (and underdevelopment) and social justice (and injustice) along with transportation. We do not live in a nation that considers urban development or social justice; instead we are a nation that is beholden to its land speculation industry and ignores centuries of racial discrimination while asserting a veneer of pluralism. That is the nation we live in, but those of us who spend more time living in an ideal nation in the sky or in our heads will continue dreaming of an ideal transportation system, one that includes an LRT subway for North Minneapolis.

The next and final segment in this series will take us back to reality somewhat. If reality is more your sort of thing, look for it here next week.

I’ve always wondered how Central Corridor – running on existing right-of-way and enhancing what has long been an overburdened bus line serving thousands of low-income Minnesotans – can be compared to I-94 – which tore down entire blocks for a dozen miles to serve higher-income motorists. Still the NAACP has been tenacious in their lawsuitagainst the project, which may be less of an indication of the staying power of racial issues than the depth of NIMBYism in American culture.

The Penn Alternative

That’s why it’s even more difficult to understand why the Bottineau Transitway project is still considering an alignment that would affect dozens of properties along Penn Ave. I went to one of the recent open houses and heard the nervous queries of residents whose houses would be taken. On top of the question of sensitivity towards racial issues in light of the history of racial iniquities perpetrated by the transportation engineering profession, the project mangers should remember that each resident is a prospective plaintiff.

All my streets, Lord, soon be widened

Not that it’s a terrible plan, if you forget that its subject area is a city in the USA with a typically long history of racial injustice. Certainly the Northside was platted with too narrow streets – the quarter’s central artery, the inaptly name Broadway, is 80′ for only a mile east of Knox, but I believe it’s North’s widest street not counting the frontage road that is Washington Ave. The Penn Alternative would widen the street to around 90-100′, assuming 20′ for two sidewalk/boulevards, 26′ for guideway, and 44′ for through and parking lanes. The plan as pdfed includes some superfluous right turn lanes but otherwise is pretty close to what a quality design for an enhanced streetcar line would look like.

The biggest problem is that even the City of Minneapolis acknowledges, in its comments to the Scoping phase, that “it is not known whether [the parcels that would need partial takings for the Penn Alternative] could be redeveloped.” Of course they could be redeveloped, especially in conjunction with the remainder of their blocks (i.e. the parcels facing Queen), but the question is whether there would be money and will. The former is self-explanatory, the latter is a cultural issue – after a chunk of the parcels were taken for redevelopment, they wouldn’t meet the city’s “buildable” standard for single family lots. I would say that only a dysfunctional culture would even want to build single family homes along a light-rail line, but we are still deep in the cult of Nimby, so that is what any community-based plan would likely call for. Even if by some miracle apartments were proposed, developers would likely find the narrow parcels awkward for building. Redeveloping the whole block would be expensive, politically difficult, and given the track record of large-scale public redevelopment in this country, potentially ghettoizing.

I guess it’s the Wirth-Olson alignment then

Double beg button on the wrong side of the pole from the walking path

Olson Highway is easily one of the worst roads in the state – an extremely wide ROW littered with beg buttons and broken sidewalks and a median that’s often less a refuge than a corral – so I hope that the city, county and state take this as an opportunity to improve it. Unfortunately, preliminary concepts for the alignment along Olson put the track in the median. This despite Olson’s 25k AADT, which easily fits on two lanes in each direction (and does fit on two lanes further west on Olson), especially with Olson’s ample room for turn lanes.

As much as LRT would improve Olson, I’m not sure I can support it on the Wirth-Olson alignment. It’s a classic Dallas scenario – the line would strategically avoid all of the dense areas that would supply it with riders. More than a year ago, Yonah Freemark pointed out that Dallas has the longest light rail system in the country, but still manages to skirt its densest neighborhoods. Unfortunately we are seeing a similar path of least resistance followed in the Twin Cities of the North, where the Olson-Wirth alignment’s densest neighborhood would be Robbinsdale, where the 5.2 households per acreis closer to the standard for intermediate frequency bus service, and a bit more than half of what’s required to support light rail. Densities are actually lower along Olson in North Minneapolis, where the local Hope VI renewal project replaced the rowhouses of Sumner Field with fewer units than were destroyed.

Commuter ridership is a dicey proposition as well. While Downtown Minneapolis has slightly more jobs than Downtown Dallas, the prospects for reverse commuting are much lower on Bottineau than on any LRT line developed or proposed here so far. Using the job cluster map produced by Reconnecting America, you can see that Hiawatha serves around 45,000 non-CBD jobs, most of which are clustered around the airport and MOA stations (that’s not counting Minneapolis South, which contains 26,000 jobs but stretches far west of Hiawatha). Central LRT will serve a remarkable 125,000 non-(Minneapolis) CBD jobs, again mostly clustered along the line. Southwest LRT will hit around 55,000 non-CBD jobs, although they’re less clustered so perhaps less likely to take the train.

Bottineau, in contrast, serves just two non-CBD job clusters: Osseo, with a respectable 24,235 jobs, but over a sprawling area that stretches up to three miles from the nearest proposed station; and Maple Grove, with a barely noticeable 3,892 jobs but that still manages to be one of the lowest-density clusters on the map. While both job clusters are likely growing, the growth would have to be spectacular and compact to begin to approach the job density of other transitways. Target’s Suburban Headquarters, which is sometimes said to “anchor” the B alternative of the northern end of Bottineau, is projected to grow to a mammoth 5,200 jobs by 2014.

So Bottineau will add maybe 30,000 sprawling jobs to the 371,000 already connected by the three other transitways when it comes online. It will pass through very low density areas. It will cost almost a billion dollars. Are we sure we want to do this? What are some other alternatives? I’ll explore them in my next couple posts.